London’s Equity Capital Markets Ecosystem

11 May 2021 / In the media Insight

By Keith Hiscock

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The City of London Corporation today published 'London’s Equity Capital Markets Ecosystem: London and the UK’s strengths as a listing venue'. The article highlights London as Europe's largest exchange and presents the challenges and opportunities that it faces.

We are delighted that our own research into how small and mid-cap quoted companies make a substantial contribution to markets has been used to form the basis of the analysis.

In 2019, we published “How small and mid-cap quoted companies make a substantial contribution to markets, employment and tax revenues” which was written in collaboration with the Quoted Companies Alliance.

With regards to small to mid-cap quoted companies, our research uncovered that:

• About three million employees work for small and medium-sized quoted companies listed on the LSE’s Main Market and AIM, while a total of 7.2 million people are employed by LSE-listed companies.
• Small and mid-sized caps listed on both AIM and the Main Market contributed £26.5bn in tax contributions:
  in 2017/18.4
• They represent 93% of all the companies quoted on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) by number (when investment companies and certain other categories are excluded – see ‘Our sample’ for more detail).
• They collectively have a market capitalisation of £428bn by value, representing 20% of the total market capitalisation of the LSE (with the same exclusions)[1].
• They employ over 3 million workers.
• They account for a substantial proportion of the workforce of all quoted companies in many regions of the UK.
• They contributed at least £26.5bn in taxes in 2017/18, we estimate, considering just Corporation Tax, Income Tax and National Insurance (NI), and ignoring VAT and Business Rates.

[1] As at the close on 28 February 2019